Nice guide Wint. That will help me out a good deal since i haven't used a retainer much yet. As far as strategies go, i think if people have a specific set of items they want to sell, like alchemy materials for instance, they may want to name the retainer in a manner that best describes what they are selling.

Edit: that reminds me, you may want to add the fact that you can give your retainer a "Nickname".

Thanks for the good work Wint! ^^ It will become very useful once SE puts in "search" function so I can actually use the market ward. /crossfingers

I noticed there was no mention of where to call your retainer outside of market wards. It took me a while to realize what those little bell things were for...So you might want to add the locations and functions of the bells in each city?

Good guide Wint. You may want to add a section on buying things with a Retainer. I know I had quite a time trying to figure out how to buy something on a Retainer and what was actually happening, if I was buying only one shard if I said I wanted wind shards, or if it would just keep buying them etc.

umm you mentioned that there is a limited number of stands, and that there is a 500gil/day lease for the stands for 24 hrs. Im assuming thats 24 earth hours? And is there a limit to how often you can renew a lease to have one of the stands? imo 500gil/day is squat to pay to have your own stand and i was thinking that if you could renew the lease an infinite number of times then it would be a good idea to grab an ideal one as soon as the game goes live then keep it forever!! :D

I noticed there was no mention of where to call your retainer outside of market wards. It took me a while to realize what those little bell things were for...So you might want to add the locations and functions of the bells in each city?

Yeah was gonna be one of my sugestions, with a picture of what the bell looks like, so easy to miss.

Also I was wondering if there is anyway to get a listing of the different options for retainer looks. Im not sure if it varies by race, ***, city state, but I did notice it was not always the same set of roegadyn across my beta test chars.

I am not quite clear on how to sell things with my retainer. So I summon them and exchange my stuff. Then I must keep them summoned in the market ward in order for them to sell? ....or do I dismiss them and they automatically go to the market ward to try to sell my things? This part is still confusing me. Any info would be appreciated.

I was talking about if you summon them outside of the market ward, such as one of the guilds. Then I believe if you dismiss them that they will automatically go to the market ward to sell your stuff. I don't know for sure, but this was my assumption. Who knows because I haven't had much luck selling things. This system seems incredibly time consuming. A considerable amount of time and effort must be put into getting a feel for the economy, since we can no longer simply browse the AH for market trends. Honestly, I think this aspect of the game is my only major concern at this point. All the UI stuff will be cleared up, but for me, I really enjoyed the convenience of an auction house. **** I even enjoyed simply browsing it and being able to take a sneak peak at all the different items in the game.

I suppose it should be noted that retainer bazaars have a lower tax (5%) than player bazaars do (10%).

And you can't find your retainer in the Wards until you summon them there and once they're in a particular Wards you can't summon them anywhere else (not even at the city bells) until you dismiss them from the Ward. Maintenance, at least with the Beta, also seems to automatically dismiss any active retainers in the Wards.

That might change come retail to make it a little easier to manage your retainer from different cities, but that's how it stands at the moment.

Were there that many in beta? I ask because I wrote this during the beta, and I was careful to include them all. I'll get that updated, thanks!

Yes, there were that many during the beta.

Anyone knonw why my retainer magically disappears from the ward I put it in sometimes? Happened in beta and just caused me to lose the first stall in the market wards. Had that stall since day one and am probably not going to get a stall in the first market ward again...

See what you think, if you have any suggestions to add (especially in the strategies) feel free to sound off in the discussions section (or here is fine too).

You actually don't list all the wards. There are in fact 20 wards in each quarter; the window only shows you eight, but you have buttons at the bottom to page back and forth (why the devil they didn't give you a scroll bar, I have no idea). I may update the page myself as soon as I can get home and sign on to get all the ward names.

I'd really like to know more about the stand hours and renewing. I once I bought a stand before going to bed one night and no longer had it when I awoke. Pretty sure I didn't sleep for 24 hours. I assume it either has to be renewed before some static time period that happened to be while I was asleep, or that I somehow accidentally clicked to terminate the lease. So any more info on how renewing a stand works would be awesome, so that I can rest easy knowing it was a mistake, and that it really will last 24 hours next time.

See what you think, if you have any suggestions to add (especially in the strategies) feel free to sound off in the discussions section (or here is fine too).

You actually don't list all the wards. There are in fact 20 wards in each quarter; the window only shows you eight, but you have buttons at the bottom to page back and forth (why the devil they didn't give you a scroll bar, I have no idea). I may update the page myself as soon as I can get home and sign on to get all the ward names.

And done. All twenty wards in each of the three quarters are now listed.

I went through the quest and got a retainer. But I don't know how or where to set it up. I am in LL and have not seen any retainers from anyone. I did find a bell, but there was no interaction available with it.

What are these market wards you speak of? Where are they found? I have found 2 market places in LL but the stalls have NPCs in them.

Once you find the location of these wards, what exactly do you do to get your retainer to come out?

Then you mention pricing and trying to get over 10% of the NPC cost. I have tried to sell to several NPCs and they don't offer anything for my shards or other items. How do you know what they will give you for something?

Sorry for all the questions. I am finding this game very unintuitive, and throw in the lag that can take 5 minutes to draw the people in the market ward and yikes!

Its a small dome bell like the ones you have to tap the button on the top to ring at doctor's offices on a small columnal stand. In gridania it should be to the right of the NPCs that give out leves. When you get close enough the (i) icon should appear at the top of your screen and you can summon the retainer in your menu.

About the lease for the stands, friend of mine had one during the beta. He lost his lease because apparently you have to go back and check in on it before the lease expires. He said it was 36 hours during the beta, but it looks like that changed to 24 for the release. He also briefly mentioned there may have been something about a payment plan, but doesn't remember (doesn't play anymore). I have yet to confirm any of this because I've been avoiding dealing with Retainers for now.